America’s Ivy League universities are among the richest institutions in the world. Cushioned by large endowments, they are also rich in terms of scholarship, influence and networks. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s daughter studied at Harvard.
The largest international donation to Harvard Business School—approximately Rs 400 crore—came from the Tata Group. Sometimes criticised as islands of privilege, these Ivy League universities are nevertheless central to the story of America and its global leadership.
According to Statista, US universities collectively attracted more Indian students (331,602 in 2023–24) than students from any other non-US nationality, with Chinese students following at 227,398.
This kind of standing and money power should, in normal circumstances, shield them from rough weather and keep their future free of material worries. However, given the complex turn that America has taken today, it is that very same standing and money power that puts them at the centre of the firestorm unleashed by the Trump administration.
Adept as they are at protecting and growing their endowments, their success has brought on charges — fair or unfair — that they spend more on investment managers to grow their kitty rather than to grow the mission to deliver education for all.
This faintly echoes an unrelated remark by American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson who, for different reasons, was barred from Harvard for three decades in the 1830s. When he said “things are in the saddle, and [they] ride mankind”, he suggested that instead of mastering the material world, we’ve become mastered by it. Have US universities become prisoners of their endowments, making them more vulnerable than they should be to the turn of events?
Several months before the current crisis erupted, Prof. Rashid Khalidi, a distinguished Palestinian-American historian at Columbia, put it in these words: “For some time now, I have been both disgusted and horrified by the way higher education has developed into a cash register — essentially a money-making, MBA, lawyer-run, hedge fund-cum-real estate operation, with a minor sideline in education, where money has determined everything, where respect for pedagogy is at a minimum.”
